The Wall Read online

  While they prepared to rappel off, Hugh looked again for any sign of the rescuers.

  “You’d think we would have seen something,” he said.

  Lewis took a swig of water. “Just as well we didn’t.”

  “They were going to call their route Trojan Women. One of the rangers told me.”

  Lewis grunted. “Talk about jinxing yourself. Prisoners of war and slaves? What a fucking name.”

  “Come on, Louie. The Trojan women were the ultimate survivors.”

  “Survivors?”

  “The last of an epic war. You know, like the age of El Cap.”

  Lewis was having none of it. “They didn’t survive, Hugh. They’re all dead.”

  Lewis’s scorn baffled Hugh. He thought maybe it had to do with the long day. They were tired. And for all their efforts, the bulk of Anasazi loomed over them.

  “Give them some credit,” Hugh said. “They were audacious as hell. Warriors. Amazons.”

  “Jesus,” said Lewis.

  “You’re the bard. Where’s your sense of poetry?”

  “That’s not poetry. It’s hubris. Rachel fed the same stuff to our girls. Dream big. Eve was framed. You can be president one day. It’s like a yeast infection, this goddess-movement stuff. They think they can dance in the flames and not get burned.”

  Hugh steadied his feet against the rock. The bitterness was not like Lewis. “If you’re saying they didn’t belong here, then maybe we don’t either,” Hugh said. “You want to talk about hubris.”

  “I’m saying look where it got them.”

  “Those women gave it everything they had.”

  “They screwed up, Hugh. They reached too far.”

  An image flashed in Hugh’s mind, the girl lying in the forest like a human sacrifice. “That’s not fair,” he said.

  “I say it like I see it,” Lewis said.

  Hugh snorted. “See what? You didn’t see anything.”

  “You gave me the tour this morning, thank you. Blood on the rocks. Blood on the trees. End of story.”

  Hugh frowned at him. “Either one of us could end up like her.”

  “Not me.”

  “Really? Talk about hubris.”

  Lewis let the big rack of carabiners clap in a thicket against the stone. “What are you doing to us, Hugh?”

  What was he doing? This was no mere tussling, the sort they used to do over Bob Dylan going electric, or which had more value, René Daumal’s imaginary Mount Analogue or the real K2. They used to worry such things back and forth until they forgot what they were arguing about. This was different. The dead women were just an excuse.

  “I think we better get something sorted out here,” Hugh said, though he couldn’t put his finger on what the something was.

  “Good idea,” Lewis said. “I mean, if you to want to bail, just say it up front.”

  “Bail?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  There it was.

  Lewis was arguing with himself. He was angry about the deaths. They terrified him. They tempted him. In talking about the women’s hubris, he was talking about his own. It wasn’t Hugh who wanted to bail, the thought wasn’t even in his mind. It was Lewis.

  You found things out about yourself and your comrades on a big climb. Hugh had been on expeditions that almost ended in murder or suicide. If Lewis had doubts, if he was already psyched out, then now was the time to admit it. The helmet, thought Hugh. He should have known when the helmet came out.

  They didn’t need to shout at each other. They were grown men. Things just hadn’t worked out. There came a time in every relationship when you had to dissolve the union. They could pull the plug on El Cap and go their separate ways, no hard feelings.

  Hugh started to say as much, that there was no sense in trying to whip a dead horse. Viagra for the soul. They’d been too old for it after all.

  But before he could speak a word, just as he was about to terminate their climb, a shadow flashed past. From out of nowhere, a thin, red streak whipped across the white stone.

  Both men grabbed for the anchor slings. They plastered themselves tight against the wall. In the same instant, each had the same thought. Rock. Loose rock. If one fell, more might.

  The blood didn’t register as blood. The shadow was their evidence, that and the now fading buzz-saw hum. Then Hugh peered over his shoulder, and there were feathers drifting in the air. More remarkable, there was a wing. A bird’s wing. Not ten feet out from the wall, a single wing.

  “What the hell?” said Lewis.

  “It must have hit one of the birds.”

  As if that were not extraordinary enough, Hugh saw the arc of a falcon disappearing across the valley. “Do you see it?” he said. It had been no rock. “God, incredible.”

  They had just witnessed a kill.

  The disembodied wing fluttered on the air current, like the sound—or sight—of one hand clapping. It was an amazing, majestic, terrifying moment.

  It should not have come as such a shock. The peregrine falcons made their aeries on narrow ledges, and portions of El Cap were closed for them during the nesting season. Hugh had heard of their “stoops,” high-speed dives that could exceed two hundred miles per hour. And there were swallows and swifts everywhere around the walls. The cycle of predator and prey went on all the time, but almost never in plain view. And never so close.

  The falcon kill sobered them. It silenced their arguing.

  Hugh looked at Lewis, and his face was speckled with the swallow’s blood. He reached over and touched Lewis’s cheek with his fingertip. His touch broke their impasse.

  Lewis turned his sunglasses to Hugh, and he had twin suns for eyes. Hugh showed the smidgen of swallow blood to him. Lewis did the same thing, touching Hugh’s face to show him that he, too, carried the blood. They were both marked.

  The freedom of the hills was never free. What they were attempting verged on the transcendent, and it would cost them, it had to. Lewis’s words echoed from decades ago, all that jazz about the holy and the seraphim. It was true. They were blessed with awful, wondrous sight up here. Suddenly, deeply, he wanted more of it.

  But then Lewis spoke. “We should go down.” His tone was final.

  Hugh’s heart sank. It was over? He let out a sigh.

  “What more do you want?” asked Lewis, watching that wing drift and tumble on the breeze.

  Hugh didn’t try to coax more ascent from him. It was reckless to tie into a man who was only half there. No, it was over. They were bailing. Walk on. “Okay,” he said.

  “We need to rest,” Lewis said.

  Not, Go home. Not, Strip the wall. Not, Erase our presence. Hugh glanced at him, taking hope. Rest.

  Lewis was running his finger along the blood beads on the stone, contemplating. “We’ve got some distance to go tomorrow. And the day after.”

  “And the day after that,” Hugh added.

  Lewis cocked his head back at the summit. “Brother, it’s a long way out of here.”

  NINE

  As the alpenglow died and darkness tightened, they settled by their haul bags on the dirt beneath an overhang. They made a cold camp tonight, no fire. They kept their voices low.

  It had not always been illegal to camp at the base of El Cap.

  It seemed like only yesterday when Hugh and Lewis and others had occupied the base of El Cap like pirates or highwaymen. Fellaheen, Lewis had anointed them. It meant “people living on the ruins of civilization.” The word came from Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a favorite of sophomore philosophers, which was what they had been.

  Hugh would object. You call this the ruins of civilization? What civilization? What ruins? This is the Valley, not some city in decay.

  Lewis would roar back, You call this living? Meaning yes, grand and absolute.

  By day, they would venture onto the virgin walls. By night, they rested. Minute by minute, they had just made it all up in their heads.

  Living off army surplus C
rations, and salami and wheels of Wisconsin cheddar, they built small campfires at night, hung their washed clothes on tree limbs, strummed pawnshop guitars, and listened to those lucky few with girlfriends rutting under the moon. It was an academy of sorts, as close as it got to what John Muir had once termed “the University of the Wilderness.” They had read and debated everything from Wittgenstein, Delta blues, and the Bomb, to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Playboy foldouts. When their beer and cheap wine ran out, they made do with river water hauled up from the Merced. So long as the climbers stuck to their caves and burrows up here, the rangers had largely left them alone.

  Now, propped against rocks and with food in their bellies, Hugh and Lewis agreed that today had been a very good day. Neither mentioned their argument at the top of the ropes. Lewis could not get over the falcon kill. It had rejuvenated him. He was awestruck. He called it a sacrifice to the gods.

  “Now we’re gods?” Hugh said.

  “You know what I mean, the ancient ones. The avatars and devis. The anima mundi. The cosmic jet stream. Do I have to give it a name? We were meant to be there, Hugh. Right then at that very moment. That was no accident in time. We were supposed to see what we saw. You don’t feel it? Right before our eyes, an offering of blood. What else is waiting for us up there? I don’t know. We’ve got to find out. We’ve got to get up there as high as we can.”

  Here was the Lewis of old, the mile-a-minute, irrepressible, full-of-bull Lewis, lit with the spirit. He fired words like machine-gun bursts, not to destroy but to pierce, to get inside the moment and root for its meaning before it slipped away.

  Hugh remembered their pilgrimages to San Francisco in search of Lewis’s Beat heroes, his “subterraneans,” the hipsters, not the hippies who were just rip-offs. Lewis refused to accept that he was a decade too late, that the Beats had turned to rockers, or died off. He was sure they must still exist somewhere in the city. But the only thing left of them in the late sixties was City Lights, the bookstore where Ferlinghetti had been arrested for selling Howl.

  While Annie and Rachel went off to trade Yosemite wildflowers for incense or Moroccan kohl for their eyes, Hugh would follow Lewis among the stacks. It was there that Hugh had purchased the leather-bound book of empty pages that became his Bible. The one book Lewis wanted more than any other, the one he was sure would lead to enlightenment, was a copy of the Black Mountain Review, Issue 7, with William Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others. Year after year, he never did find it. His solution, ultimately, was to start his own bookstore. It will come to me with time.

  On the ride back from Frisco in Hugh’s blue VW beetle, worn out and happy, the four of them would share their discoveries and acquisitions, everything from Zig-Zag rolling papers to the latest on Vietnam to ayurvedic medicines. Inevitably someone would have found a Ouija board or books on the I Ching and the Kama Sutra.

  Hugh lay his head back against a rock. Annie’s face came to him, her young face, the one he’d fallen in love with, not the sandblasted mask with red eyes that stared from his nightmares. What a beauty she’d been. At times, he missed her so badly he ached. Tonight he merely ached, every muscle and joint in him. He put her image away. “Go to sleep, Lewis,” he said.

  Tomorrow morning, they would leave this world to go into another. For the next week, they would take shelter where they could, on ledges or in hammocks. When they surfaced at the top, they would stagger drunkenly, their balance shot. Well after the wall was finished, they would startle awake in the middle of the night, their bodies still vigilant. But for this final night before embarking, they could walk like Homo sapiens and piss freely and feel the ground against their backs.

  But Lewis wasn’t ready to sleep. The death of the swallow had him going. He recited the paradox of Kant’s dove, a bird that imagines how much easier flight would be without air to resist its wings, and ends up plummeting through empty space. It was an all-purpose parable for Lewis, holding various meanings depending on his need. Tonight the dove simply seemed a means of wrapping up the day. Nature was awesome. The Trojan women had flown too close to the sun. Tomorrow was his and Hugh’s turn.

  “Amen,” murmured Hugh, and drifted off.

  He woke from a deep sleep, suddenly, not certain why. He lay still, waiting for something more.

  The stars boiled in a narrow chute between the wall and the forest. Lewis wasn’t snoring. The forest was quiet. Hugh was about to close his eyes when he saw a shape gliding among the upper branches.

  The moon wouldn’t get full for another few nights, meaning the moon shadows were faint. But enough light lingered to show the thing as it glided from one tree to another. It came to rest high above him, clinging there, resting perhaps, or getting his scent. Hugh didn’t move inside his sleeping bag. He tried to get a sense of its size and whether it had wings.

  It seemed to breathe with the breeze. Even as its lungs sucked in and out, he saw another of the things approaching on the moonbeams. It made a quick slip higher, then folded, and grabbed on to a different tree. A minute later, a little flurry of white butterflies quivered past. Hugh was baffled. What kind of night creatures were these?

  Then he remembered the women’s debris.

  Descending their fixed ropes, Hugh and Lewis had looked out across the acres of treetops at the leftovers from the Trojan Women disaster. It was like coming across the remnants of a shipwreck, with gear and clothing spread in a wide fan among the highest branches. A parka neatly outstretched. A spaghetti mess of ropes and slings tangled in the limbs. Plastic bags had sailed among the redwoods like a flotilla of jellyfish.

  Here was the last of them, Hugh realized, looking at the ghostly shapes above him. Plastic bags and the confetti of a shredded paperback. It was trickling down like sediment to the seafloor. The snaky stuff like ropes would probably bind up in the highest reaches and, over the coming seasons, slowly bleach white in the sun. Winter would flush the rest to earth where it would disintegrate or mingle with the garbage tossed off by other climbers.

  He tried judging the time from the stars, and gave up. They were living without watches or cell phones now. He glanced at the odds and ends that had emptied out of Cyclops Eye. Living on the ruins of civilization.

  He was almost asleep again when he heard the ceramic clatter of rock on rock. It made him sit up. He heard it again, the click-clack of talus and a low, guttural huff.

  Scavengers, thought Hugh. Though probably not a bear. The bears tended to stay closer to Yosemite Village where the pickings were easy.

  Another clap of stone. This time Hugh saw a curl of fireflies among the trees. In Yosemite? In this cold?

  A man—or his phantom upper half—materialized in the phosphorous glow. He was a gaunt thing. A forest dweller. That should have tipped Hugh off. But still the sight didn’t register. He was too curious to question it out loud. He waited for the specter to leave the trees and come closer.

  They weren’t fireflies, but a collar of chemical lights.

  Hugh switched on his headlamp.

  Joshua howled.

  He was a startling sight, his mane and beard caked with mud, and a knife clutched in his teeth. The chemical lights dangled against his body hair. Like some junkyard aborigine, he’d painted stripes and circles on his naked chest with what appeared to be lipstick and axle grease. He’d blacked his face, and tied feathers to his straggly hair.

  He loped crookedly across the boulders, going for Hugh. He had the knife in his good hand now. The blade was black, like a sliver of night.

  “Joshua.” Hugh shouted it, trying to freeze the madman with his own name.

  Joshua bounded at Hugh with a scream. Hugh kicked to free his body from the sleeping bag, but it tangled his legs. He shoved to his feet, and hopped to the side.

  His light beam sluiced every which way. He lost Joshua. He found him. The knife was in midarc. Stone. A stone knife. It glinted.

  The knife strobed down through dark and light. Hugh fell back. Jos
hua slashed again. Hugh rolled and thrashed. The damn bag.

  His only weapon was the headlamp. He thrust the light into Joshua’s eyes. With his hand, he physically shoved the light at him, and it worked for a moment. Joshua staggered, blinded. He cut at the darkness, cut at the light. Hugh peeled the sleeping bag from his legs.

  Absurd, thought Hugh. This couldn’t be happening. There was a manhunt on for this guy. He should have been miles away by now. And Hugh, caught with his pants down, barefoot, in his Fruit Of The Loom underwear, hands taped for the climb.

  “Lewis,” he yelled. Should he run? Upslope or down?

  “She told me what you did to her,” Joshua said.

  The lunatic had strung together a little necklace. Hugh recognized the jade and turquoise and other beads from the girl’s hair. The crazy bastard.

  “Stop,” said Hugh. “You’ve got me. We’ll leave. It’s all yours.”

  The man was an animal. A monster. He thought he owned it all, the forest, the shadows, the stone, the dead souls. Joshua slashed at him again. Hugh flailed with the light beam, flicking at those eyes, whipping at them. He backed against the wall and felt for holds, but it was slick as ice. There was no way he could climb fast enough anyway. The man would hamstring him before he got three feet. Where was Lewis?

  “Take our food,” Hugh said. The bastard had eaten his pear. In mortal danger, and that rankled him still. “Whatever you want, take it.”

  Joshua swelled his chest. He was wheezing. The red lipstick and the grease marked his starved-dog ribs like war paint. “No more running. No more hiding.”

  Joshua scuttled closer, absent his walking stick. Was that what this was about? He fisted the knife, blade down, and raised his arm. Hugh had the presence of mind to note that the blade was made of black obsidian.

  “Bismullah.” Hugh barked it at him, more an urge than a thought. In the name of God.

  Joshua hesitated. The word—the mystery of it, perhaps, or Hugh’s commanding tone—astonished him.